Tone Report Weekly Issue 144 - Page 26

young guys, not so much for young
women. For women that do get in the
business though, their careers are a lot
about putting up with marginalization
and working twice as hard for a fraction
of the pay. Those are realities that I
really want to see change in my lifetime
TR: Today’s market is centered very
much around the idea of open source;
where many ideas and creations are
free to share and collaborate upon.
The conversation on intellectual
property in all fields is rapidly
changing, and how do you feel the
changing nature of intellectual
property is affecting your business
and your designs?
FB: It’s a sticky issue. I think that the
people who cry for an open-source
world are absolutely not those in the
physical manufacturing game. If you
want ideas to be free for all, then the
world would have to be made up of free
ideas, but it is not. For those who have
to make a living transforming ideas into
tangible real world consumables, the
fundamental truths of having some kind
of ownership of intellectual property
come into play. Manufacturing anything
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INTERVIEW //
is expensive and risky, and making
anything of high quality with care is a
very costly and painstaking affair.
Without some protections, or without at
least a cultural acceptance of the
concept of ownership of a design or a
product by a person or company that
invents it, there can be no equal playing
field in manufacturing. It would come
down to an industry where only those
companies with the muscle to litigate or
the financial resources to simply not care
about infringement would survive. Elon
Musk loves open source for his designs,
because he can afford to love it.
Don’t get me wrong, I am all for anyone
who wants to make a clone for their
own pedal board, that’s what DIY is all
about – but if you manufacture a clone
and sell it on eBay or Etsy or create a
company around a knock off for a profit,
then you are not DIY, you’re basically
part of what is killing the soul of the
industry, and that is adding more copies
and pushing out the inventors and
designers. That’s the big difference to
be made in my view.
TR: Thank you for your time!
FB: You’re most welcome, Yoel!
The Return of Real Boutique: A Chat with Fran Blanche of Frantone